News of a difficult situation on the Wikipedia article on Received Pronunciation. In the section on Vowels, someone has inserted a large and complex table which in my opinion contains so many problems that it should be taken out. The author originally put it in a few days ago with many more faults, and I removed it, offering to help the author (who is obviously new to writing for WP) to re-work it. The author has now reinstated the table having corrected a few of the things I drew attention to. The oddest thing is that in the first version the data was supposed to come from published work by Lass (2002) and Bekker (2008), both of which were works on South African English. This has now been changed to Wells, John (2007) - no reference given beyond that!

Obviously we can't go on with me deleting the chart and the author reinstating it, so I have asked WP's conflict resolution people to look into it. Meanwhile I would be glad of any comments about the disputed chart and whether the phonetic values in it look correct.

For those not familiar with Wikipedia, each article has a "Talk" page associated with it where you can read the discussion about controversial matters in an article - the discussion about this vowel chart is in the last two items. (I find it hard to get to the Talk page of an article when I am using the iPad version of WP).